gph

Then you'd just be optimizing even more for sociopathic politicians. It's not like caring more about your children than power is some universal behavior in humans.

There is undoubtedly some hardliners that want the nuclear program to continue so they can develop nuclear weapons in order to provide a reliable deterrent against Israeli aggression.

It's more like the middle class is bifurcating between upperish middle class and lower-middle class. In-demand tech workers, doctors, high-level admins/managers, etc. are getting higher and higher wages while other professions that used to be middle class as starting to stagnate and fall behind such as low-level office workers, journalists, teachers, mid-to-low level managers, etc. I wouldn't consider either group to really be upper class, but I guess there's always going to be differences in how people are sorted into those categories.

I think the issue is that the article is inflammatory click-bait because it makes it seems like rich people are getting a break while poor people are getting shafted. It's not until you've read through most the entire article that they finally get to the point, which is that 'rich' people are buying houses in the suburbs/exurbs now that they can work remotely. Unsurprisingly this means prices are spiking in those areas while rent for high-end apartments are shrinking as demand dries up. So rich people aren't really catching a break so much as exiting the rental market in major cities and redirecting their spending to the suburban housing market.

But it also has property taxes and maintenance costs, which will likely be higher than inflation. So it's not a great passive investment unless you expect the value minus costs to gain faster than inflation. Otherwise you gotta live in it or rent it to make back your money, and that's no longer passive.

Yea but the OP was making the claim that no US government official would dare stand up to Bezos for fear of him outspending them out of office. Entrenched incumbents in non-battleground states/districts really don't have that fear at all.

>(he could literally just liquidate a portion of his wealth and have someone else elected in your place through campaign contribution)

That's a HUGE over exaggeration. Yes money matters, but only so much and it very much matters where that funding comes from. That's why McConnell still has a job despite his opponent spending three times as much. People knew that money was coming from outsiders trying to unseat him. Bezos or some other billionaire trying to pour an ungodly amount of money into a political campaign is more likely to backfire than help.

The 33 vs 66 is in reference to the percentage chance that a prediction is correct. But if you have no way to tell if a given prediction is correct or not without doing the tests that you were trying to avoid in the first place then it's not really worthwhile except for perhaps some exploratory research.

I'm not really sure what your point is.

>If it got answer right 1 time in 100, that would be amazing and you'd be foolish not to use it!

Except you have no way of knowing if the answer it gives you is one of the 66 right predictions vs one of the 33 wrong predictions. You could say it's likely correct, but not to a high enough degree of confidence that you could really trust it without verifying using the old established techniques.

So who said America holds free and open trade as an absolute value that we'd uphold even when faced with partners not willing to uphold that value?

You just decided to add extra constraints to my argument for no reason.

>If you support your "values" only on a reciprocal basis, essentially you renounce them. And you certainly lose the moral high ground when you try to get others to adopt these values.

I can't agree with that at all. I hold non-violence as a value, but I'm also going to defend myself if attacked and I don't think that means I renounce my values or lose any moral high ground.

There are plenty of situations where supporting a high-minded value requires reciprocation.

*Omniscient

Though I guess it might be hard to deceive an entity that is literally everywhere.

But you'll notice the companies that successfully gain value through merging are typically competitors that are able to generate more value together instead of fighting for the same profits.

The same does not seem to be true for any of the Alphabet companies, except in the sense of being able to leverage shared user data for better targeted ads. Perhaps that does make it worth it to remain one company, but it's debatable, especially for something like Waymo which likely won't benefit from having access to search data.

You say that with such conviction when you don't have any better info on what the future holds than anyone else.

The unemployment benefits (which for many of the unemployed will actually be higher than their regular pay) last for the next four months. If the quarantine lifts by the end of May and businesses reopen then it will be enough. Obviously that's a big if, but for you to come out here and act like you know something with 100% certainty is absurd.

No you're right. A lot of people are going to make more on unemployment than they would employed. I'm a junior software engineer and I wouldn't be making that much less on unemployment than I do right now.

No one that wasn't already starving should be starving at this point. Except perhaps gig workers.